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Canada’s David Clayton-Thomas was blessed with a big, booming baritone, one of the most recognizable voices in pop music, a gift that took him from the clubs and coffeehouses of Toronto’s Yonge Street and Yorkville all the way to Woodstock, Hollywood and beyond. As the frontman of jazz-rock pioneers Blood, Sweat & Tears, which topped the charts in 1969 with horn-driven hits like “And When I Die,” “You’ve Made Me So Very Happy” and his own “Spinning Wheel,” the singer lived a charmed life, winning awards, adulation and a king’s ransom of earnings that allowed him to indulge his taste for luxury cars and sprawling, palatial homes in coveted locations like the Catskill Mountains. But C...

In the mid-1960s, Toronto was teeming with pop groups and teenagers inspired by the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. One of the city’s most popular bands, however, took its cues not from the British Invasion but from the rhythm-and-blues sound of American artists such as Otis Redding and Wilson Pickett. That band was the Mandala. With a dazzling stage show featuring choreography, strobe lights and sonic effects, the Mandala became a sudden sensation. Dressed like costumed gangsters in striped suits, black shirts and white ties, the five members took their self-styled “soul crusade” across Canada, down to New York and out to Los Angeles, earning rave reviews for fever-pitched concerts that cri...

When Jack Long opened his first musical instrument store in Toronto in 1956, he was a skilled jazz trumpeter without a clue about business. “I didn’t even know what an invoice was,” he often said. Mr. Long learned the hard way. When sales were slow, he and a drummer friend, Jack McQuade, started giving lessons in the store’s back rooms. When they discovered colleagues often wanted to borrow instruments, Mr. Long invented modest rental fees: “three dollars if it was small, four dollars if it was bigger.” Together as partners, the two Jacks grew the company until 1965, when Mr. McQuade decided to pursue drumming full-time and sold his portion of the firm to Mr. Long. Today, the family-owned Lo...